It is somewhat difficult to obtain information from the Chinese themselves as to the position of women. They are very averse to discussing the subject; in fact, it is not even regarded as good manners for a man to ask after the health of his most intimate friend's wife; and all the information that we could {123} get had for the most part to be obtained by Lady Florence Cecil through feminine sources. We may generally state, however, that the position of women in China is neither so low as that which they occupy in India or among the Mohammedans, neither is it in any degree so high as the position of women in Western lands. The woman is completely subject to the man; till she marries she is subject to her father, when she is married she is subject to her husband, and if her husband dies she is then subject to her son, and rarely re-marries. These are called the three obediences. She is not educated as a rule, because both public opinion and Chinese philosophy regard her as mentally far inferior to the man. We shall explain later on how in Chinese thought everything is divided into a good and an evil principle--a Yang and a Yin. The woman is distinctly Yin. She is therefore necessary to man, but at the same time inferior. Again, with regard to the question of polygamy, her position is an intermediate one between the avowed polygamy of Moslem countries and the ill-maintained monogamy of many a Latin country. In Hong-Kong the position was explained by a Chinaman to me thus: that when a woman grew old it was regarded as her duty to provide a secondary wife for her husband's pleasure and as a companion for herself--a companion with a sense of servitude in it. If this was done in an orderly manner, it was absolutely approved by Chinese public opinion. If, {124} on the other hand, the husband, ignoring the wife's rights, should choose a secondary wife for himself and set her up in another house, his attitude would be regarded as distinctly doubtful by the respectable Chinese. In the same way if an official were appointed to a distant post he would probably not think of imposing upon his wife with her deformed feet the pain and discomfort of a long journey; he would most likely take a natural-footed woman, who will be for that reason a slave; in fact, one gentleman went so far as to say that he thought that the squeezed feet had a great deal to do with this institution of a secondary wife, because he noted that the secondary wives of all the officials when they were travelling were natural-footed women. The secondary wife would be rarely a woman of good class; it is allowed to be an inferior position. On the other hand, if she bears her husband a son, and that son is recognised, all that son's relations, and therefore all his mother's relations, become relations of the father.